“May your life be like this quilt- perhaps not free of mistakes- but full of color, warmth, and love.”

Now about that “mistakes” bit … At the time, I did NOT like the implication that I might make mistakes along the way or that perhaps I had already made a mistake or two here or there. Perfectionist, summa cum laude, no mistakes allowed, no way.

Several years and a good many mistakes later, I think I understand the inscription a little better.

In order to figure out what you want in life, you have to open cans of worms, or get it a bit messy, or whatever you want to call it. Jobs, marriage, kids– those can all be cans of worms, yet very WORTHWHILE cans of worms.

Moving to a new place, moving outside one’s comfort zone … life goes forward because you do “mess it up” now and then! Just a thought. You may feel that you have one chance to do things right, but always remember there is more than one way– many, many paths to having a wonderful life.

http://www.katrinakenison.com/ordinary-day-journal/2010/6/26/homecomings.html

“The day we moved away six years ago — a day that I saw at the time as a wrenching finale to our sons’ childhoods and the life we’d known — was in fact no such thing. It was just a day. Life transforming itself the way it does: this happens, and then that happens. In Buddhism it is said that all causes and conditions are related; that the world exists in a state of interdependence. Because one thing arises, another arises; because of this, that.

And so it occurs to me now that I was mistaken to ever think of life as a simple series of endings and beginnings. How self-defeating, to try so hard to grab hold of those things I wanted to keep intact, with the idea that permanence just might be possible. Sitting here by myself, looking at the empty shell of a house that was once stuffed full of us — but that is now the center of another family’s universe — I think I finally get it: home really is the place where I am right now, if I choose to make it so. And if I’m awake, and open, and loving what is, then I am always at home, no matter what roof is above my head or what return address I stamp in the upper corner of an envelope.”

I hope that in the next months, you find a home that is where you are. And that your beginning of your middle (??) is an exhilarating one.